Edmonia Lewis 2022 Forever Stamps — Black Heritage Series, First-Class Postage

Edmonia Lewis's sculpture carries the complexity of her own social position, and she seems to have wanted it that way.

Early life

She was known by an Ojibwe name that translates as Wildfire. Part of her childhood was spent near Niagara Falls, NY, living with her aunts and making crafts to sell to tourists. Much of the rest is unclear — deliberately so, since Lewis cultivated an air of mystery about her origins. Her brother, a successful entrepreneur, appears to have paid for her education, an opportunity almost no American woman had in the 1850s.

The work

Her earliest known piece is a drawing of the muse Urania, made while she was at Oberlin College in Ohio. In Boston in the early 1860s she was producing busts and medallion portraits of well-known men and women in clay, plaster and marble, exhibiting at public events and selling plaster-cast replicas.

She sailed for Europe in 1865 and settled in Rome, where she worked in marble in a neoclassical mode and repeatedly took African American and Native American subjects. A Roman Catholic, she also produced religious sculpture and accepted church commissions in Baltimore and in Scotland. Her studio became a fixture on the American tourist circuit, and she went on making busts of prominent Americans passing through Rome into the 1870s and 1880s, returning regularly to the United States to exhibit and sell.

Reassessment

Renewed attention over recent decades has turned up works whose locations were unknown, and she is far better represented in museums and private collections than she was. As more of the work surfaces, scholars continue to reassess her place in American art — and the ways she explored, asserted or downplayed her own cultural identity to meet the expectations of her period, or to push past them.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum and Google Arts & Culture both hold further material on her life and career.

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